brick by brick
by bellesandwhistles
Summary: Charlotte Xavier is a geneticist developing a museum on the Human Genome. Erik Lehnsherr is an architect with anger issues. Literally the AU to end all AUs: Modern, no powers, genderswapping
1. Prologue

AU, aka, my own little world. Don't own.

* * *

"Listen," Charlotte Xavier said, one arm perched tenuously on the bar, the other on her hip. "All I've gotten out of today is a PhD in a subject worthless to anyone but me, and five Campari and sodas." She leaned in a little closer to the man across from her and smiled. The winning Xavier smile that always seemed to bend others to her will. "So, what I'm saying is, tonight could be made a lot better. There's potential here."

The man seemed responsive, all blond hair and the common kind of handsome that would be fuzzy to Charlotte tomorrow morning. He tucked a few strands of brown hair, the color Mrs. Xavier liked to dress up as "glossy chestnut", behind her ear, then turned towards the barman and ordered her another drink. He then ordered, for himself, Pabst Blue Ribbon. Charlotte felt an inner wave of distaste. He got points off for that, but not as many as if he were one of the Brooks Brothers-clad Wall Street types who always seemed to find her, realize who she was, hit on her, order a Jameson on the rocks, with a twist, for themselves, and _then_ bring back a drink for her without asking what she liked. It was always a Gin and Tonic. Charlotte detested Gin and she detested Tonic, her mother's two best, and sometimes only, friends. So she gave Mr. PBR a pass.

"Congratulations, then. On your Graduation," he said, laughing at his rhyme until he noticed Charlotte's blank look of unamused. Well, if anything, at least Charlotte had gotten a free drink out of him. She couldn't remember the last time she'd ever had to buy herself a drink at a bar. Had she ever? She wouldn't even know what to tip the bartender. Did they even tip here? Maybe that was just a New York thing. Her mind was losing track of its own thread. Charlotte decided she was drunk.

The man was still talking. About her gorgeous green eyes, green like celery, green like Kermit the Frog. The stars were not aligned in her favor tonight. Or ever, for that matter. Taking her level of inebriation into account, she decided she'd give him one last chance. God, did she need to get laid. She interrupted him mid-sentence.

"Do you know that's a mutation? That's what I study. Mutations. Your colorblindness, I mean." Oh, yes. She was talking in circles. That sixth drink had gone down smooth.

"Wait, what? I'm not colorblind. I even passed that test with the giant E and everything." Charlotte decided to ignore that last comment.

"Yes, you are. My eyes are blue. But it's all right. Some mutations are really quite groovy. My sister Raven, for example-" Charlotte felt a tug on her arm, and turned away from the man to give her sister the kind of ebullient hug that only a drunk person – no, a drunken Charlotte Xavier – can give. "Speak of the devil and she shall appear!" Charlotte teetered on her heels, cursing them. Four inches of pain and still pitifully the shortest one in the room, particularly standing next to the modelesque Raven.

"Aaaand the devil says it's time to go home," Raven said, taking the highball from her sister's fist and placing it on the bar. "Yes!," she preemptively glared at Charlotte, knowing that her sister would look at her in that extraordinarily persuasive way that exemplified the famous Xavier charm (which Raven hadn't seemed to inherit).

"But – I was just telling this lovely young man," "Alex," he filled in for her, and she continued. "Yes, Alex here, all about his mutation!"

"Honey, once you start using the word 'groovy', it's time to stop drinking." Raven helped Charlotte into her coat (the lovely, lovely Burberry trench that her mother had told her was common but which she'd bought anyways and look was that a penny on the floor?) and linked arms with her sister, supporting her more than she'd like to admit. "Bye, Al!," Charlotte called back to the dejected-looking man, who was just realizing he'd missed out on not one, but both of the Xavier sisters.

"But, hey! It was working!," Charlotte argued belatedly. They were on the street now, Raven desperately trying to flag down a cab and keep her sister upright at the same time.

"Yes, but really, Charlotte. You could do so much better than that rando at the bar. He looked vaguely criminal. And the last time you tried using the whole mutation thing as a pick up line, you wound up telling Sean Cassidy all about his second copy of Chromosome 16 and _woke up in his bed_. No more gingers. No more mutations. No more getting shitfaced every time your mother makes her once-yearly appearance." Charlotte looked like she was about to cry. Raven really didn't have the patience for this right now, particularly when Hank had just texted her about some house party in Soho that would take an age to get to from wherever the fuck this dive was.

"No one cares about what I do. Mum couldn't give a ship. Shit. I mean, shit."

"Charlotte, look at me. You have to make them care. You have to make the world care. You have so much passion in you, and I know you can do it. I also know that you're drunk right now but you need to _pull it together_. Got it? You've graduated, you're done. Life is not a glass of pink champagne."

"But why not? What are you doing?," Charlotte asked as Raven shoved her in the back of a cab, giving the cabbie the address to her flat, since Charlotte had already moved out of her own to move to New York tomorrow – well, later today, she supposed.

"You figure it out," Raven told her, shutting the door and waving as it drove away.


	2. Chapter 1

_Three months later_

Charlotte looked at herself in the mirror. She could do this. She was trying to give herself a pep talk. Hell if she even knew what a pep talk even was. She'd never really been good at sports. She'd always been voted "Most Improved" at the end of the season. Yet she always kept playing. Where had that unshaken self-confidence gone? She figured she'd lost it somewhere across the Atlantic. Or maybe it had been when it'd come up in conversation with the chair of the department that the rest of the genetics faculty had gone out for drinks without her, and then he joked that they hadn't thought her past the drinking age. Funny. Not that she would have gone anyways, she told herself. She was the only woman in the department, besides a few old crones who had probably been alive to work with Gregor Mendel.

She was wearing a tweed blazer, in an attempt to make herself look distinguished, without looking old. It had belonged to her father; it had elbow patches. When she wore it she liked to pretend that it still smelled like him, fifteen years on. But with her horn-rimmed glasses, skinny jeans, and penny loafers, she looked more hipster than highbrow.

Today was her first real class as a real professor, not a tutor or teaching assistant. It was a 100-series lecture, mostly freshmen. Lots of fresh minds to indoctrinate! Sometimes she thought she sounded like a cult leader to others when she tried to explain her enthusiasm for teaching and how much she loved working with young people (never mind the fact that she herself was a young person). Whatever, it would be the first university class for most of them, she figured. It's not as if they knew any different. She focused on her plans to meet for drinks with Moira, one of her first New York friends. Moira MacTaggert was a few years older than her and an associate professor of International Affairs, with a focus on Cold War studies. God, she could use that drink right now. And it wasn't even 9 am. But it was happy hour somewhere, right?

Providing that all went to plan, even if she somehow managed to fail as a professor, she still had the museum to fall back on. It was Moira who'd originally encouraged her to get the wheels rolling, after she'd explained the seed of idea to her the day they'd first met, at the coffee shop that they both liked simply because it wasn't the faculty club. The idea, truly, was really all thanks to Raven, at least indirectly. Raven had told her that she needed to make them care. So Charlotte was going to make the world care about genetics just as much as she did. And a museum seemed like the perfect way to do it. Not a stuffy museum like the ones uptown near the park and near her mother's seldom-used doorman-building apartment. A children's museum, or really, a museum for everyone. Lots of things to touch, films to watch, labs to visit. She'd planned the entire thing out during the flight to JFK in a cheap steno notebook she'd purchased at Heathrow. She'd expected a hangover after the events of the night before (or really, earlier that day), but she'd been so excited that the plan consumed her. She hadn't been this excited about genetics, about _anything_, for weeks. Months, even.

When Charlotte mentioned her vague semblance of a plan to Moira, some of her enthusiasm must have rubbed off. Charlotte had always been able to do that, and she didn't know why. When she had a plan, when she was excited about something, she was a master of persuasion, sometimes without even trying. Raven chalked that bit up to Charlotte's "winning smile and disgustingly chipmunk-like personality" (a classically Raven quote), but Charlotte tended to think it had to do with the oddly intuitive way she was able to pick up on people's feelings. Everyone seemed to put off, she didn't know, different _vibes_ of how they were feeling, and Charlotte just seemed to be exceptionally good at reading them.

Which is why she knew her department didn't like her because she was young, and because she was excited, and because she was a woman, and why Moira liked her for those exact reasons. And how she knew why the nice barista always gave her an extra shot of espresso in her latte when she smiled at him, and why her mother so cold towards her and downright resentful towards Raven.

Not that her mother hadn't been useful, in her own way. It was through her mother's connections that Charlotte had reached out to the museum's two biggest donors, Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost. And of course, she had her mother to thank for the well-managed trust fund that had seemed to weather the recession and multiply to the tune of several hundred million dollars, plus who knows how much more in other assets and investments. Altogether, it would do very nicely for the foundations of the museum, particularly if they could get support from the Smithsonian or a major university lab.

She locked the door to her fifth-floor one-bedroom in Nolita, juggling her laptop, the textbook she'd assigned to her students, and her phone, seeing that she had a missed call from Raven and a reminder about the meeting she had with Shaw and Emma later that day. Waving to Logan, her elderly Canadian neighbor who had apparently been quite the looker in his time, she left her building to walk the few blocks uptown to NYU. She called Raven, praying that her sister would pick up. She didn't want another 5 am call from Raven with a "Whoops! Could have sworn it was daylight out your way!" as way of greeting. Raven, still in London, had just finished her studies at Central Saint Martins, where she had studied design. Now, interning at Alexander McQueen, she was desperate to start her own line, which, in typical dramatic Raven fashion, would be called _Mystique_.

"Listen – I know it's early but I just wanted to wish you good luck! Are you wearing that bracelet I got you for your graduation? It's lucky!"

Charlotte rolled her eyes and made a comment about how she was a _scientist_, and she certainly did not believe in _luck_, but honestly, she did appreciate her sister's thought, and the bracelet was gorgeous and she hadn't taken it off her wrist in months.

"I know you think this Shaw guy is a creep, and honestly I don't doubt it if he's a friend of your mum's, but you need to milk him for all he's worth. You're the most charming person I know. Just get inside his mind and convince him that you absolutely _need_ the extra 20 mil, or legions of little children will cry," Raven continued.

Charlotte smiled. "You know, he probably does that for fun anyways. But I'm working on it. We're having a benefit to raise money for it, did I tell you that? That's part of what the meeting's about. Promise me – "

"That I'll come to New York and attend as your fabulously jaw-droppingly stunning date?"

"Yes, so I can use you as a human shield when photographers from _Town & Country_ try and take my picture."

"God, no. I really don't want to see another tabloid picture of us with a headline that says 'Xavier heiress and lesbian lover?'"

Charlotte felt guilty at that. Raven was her sister but – not really. At least not in the eyes of Mrs. Xavier, who had let it be known that, despite the fact that Raven was the daughter of her late husband, and had come to live with the Xaviers after the death of her mother, she was really her husband's illegitimate daughter by one Diana Darkholme, and thus had nothing to do with _her._ And so though among society circles it was known that Charlotte and Raven were sisters, Raven was always introduced as "Charlotte's very good friend." Charlotte, well, she hadn't exactly done very much to correct anyone, considering the fact that she liked to stay as far away from her mother as possible. She knew that this made Raven feel inferior, like Charlotte didn't want anyone to think they were really sisters, which is why she felt guilty.

It helped, of course, to laugh about the fact that the press had invented a story a few years ago, when they had been sharing an apartment, that the two were secret life partners. News must have been slow that day.

"But that was so much fun! We got to hold hands and gaze lovingly into each other's eyes to bait the paparazzi and make my mother angry. I don't know what I would do if you weren't there."

"Charlotte, no. You need a real date. A man date, unless you really do have latent lesbian tendencies that I just don't know about."

"Well, fine. Bring Hank with you! I'll use him!"

"Charlotte, Hank is a gay man who does drag wearing a furry blue bikini under the name of Madame Beastly. Not exactly what I was thinking."

Charlotte knew Raven was never going to let this go. It was time to make a quick escape.

"Oh, no!" Charlotte winced at how obviously fake that sounded. "I've got class in five minutes! Call me when you want to talk about plane tickets!" She hung up before Raven could respond. And before Charlotte could admit to herself that Raven did have a point. Charm someone at a bar by pointing out their heterochromia iridum (and by crossing and uncrossing her legs 12 times and letting Raven do her makeup, maybe)? No problem. Finding someone she could stand to be around for an entire night, and who wouldn't be put off by her freakish enthusiasm for the human genome? That was a problem. Perhaps she could rope one of her older grad students into coming. Was that even ethical? She really did not want to be thinking about this right now. Or ever.

But despite the fact that her life's work was divided between studying human beings and passing on this knowledge to other human beings, the only person she felt really, truly at ease around was Raven. The other had been her father.

However, she forgot all of that when she walked into the lecture hall a minute after hanging up with Raven. She inhaled deeply and turned on the projector. This, she knew how to do. And when a student in the front row asked her whether the professor was running late, she smiled as she corrected him and started her lecture.


	3. Chapter 2

Her meeting with Shaw and Emma was at six, at the Campbell Apartment, above Grand Central Terminal (Shaw's pick). She was not nervous. If anything, she had been groomed her whole life for things like this: sitting on committees, managing charitable trusts, seeking donations from rich donor friends. She was sad to admit it, but she felt much more comfortable in this environment than she did at the university among petty white middle aged men who weren't married and probably never would be. All right, now _she_ was being petty. But of course she'd never show it. She couldn't help but believe that if she only knew what they were thinking they would have some sort of excuse for their behavior. Raven would just tell her to stand up for herself.

She had changed into a crisp, white shirtdress and a pair of black Manolo stilettos in an effort to look less like a 12-year-old library volunteer and more like a potential museum founder, trust manager, and curator. But to be honest, Raven's joking aside, Charlotte knew that she already had blank checks from Shaw and Emma in the palm of her hand. Sure, the museum would probably end up with a completely idiotic name like the Shaw-Frost Institute for Genetics, but she didn't mind. The more money she had, the bigger her audience could reach. And that was more worth it than anything.

That was the benefit of having the Xavier name. Normally she hated being given special treatment – especially when Raven so clearly _wasn't_ – but, she didn't mind exploiting her name and her money for a good cause. She'd been trying to convince Mrs. Xavier to convert the mansion in Westchester into a home for stray animals for years.

This meeting was a chance for them to get down to business. Charlotte had resisted outsourcing the museum's development to a more experienced team, insisting on overseeing it herself. Maybe that was being selfish, she thought, considering that a real curator would know how to market the museum to a wide audience and make it a true success. But the opportunity to immerse herself in the creation of the museum brought back the feelings that had drawn her to science since the beginning. She was reminded of the day she found (read: stole) her stepbrother's dusty microscope languishing in the storeroom, and when she realized that the _entire world_ lay before her, just waiting to be placed on her glass slides.

Besides, she was a scientist. She didn't want the museum to dumb down anything about genetics. She wanted the museum to bring the best and the newest information culled from a field that was changing more rapidly than ever. She didn't want a stuffed Dolly the cloned sheep; she wanted a real petting zoo of cloned sheep. She wanted scientists in white coats talking to children about science and genes and treating them like the way she wished she had been treated as a child, as if she was intelligent. As if she was worth something. She wanted to go into the nasty precursors to modern genetics like eugenics, which other, perhaps wiser, curators wouldn't touch for fear of being polemic. She wanted to reach out to underserved communities, and to girls who got told that science was for boys. She wanted to provoke conversation with the museums' visitors. But mostly, she wanted them to care. She wanted them to be excited. And while the normal channels of creating a museum from the ground up might yield higher profit margins, better gift shops, more reviews in the New York Times, Charlotte doubted they would ever be able to make visitors excited unless they cared just as much as she did.

So, she had decided to take the reins. It was a lot, and she probably didn't even know the amount of work she had signed up for, but it didn't bother her. She had, after all, graduated from Harvard at 16, and had a PhD in Genetics, was currently working towards ones in Biophysics and Psychology, and wasn't yet 25. Why more people didn't hate her, she had no idea.

Today was meant to be for planning the benefit she had mentioned to Raven, as well as thinking about hiring an architect for the museum building itself. The planning of the benefit, Charlotte figured, she could leave up to Emma. The architecture, Charlotte was substantially more interested in. Part of the reason she had been so drawn to the idea of creating a museum was based on her love of museums themselves. The Getty, which to her was the only bearable thing in LA, and the Guggenheim, were her two favorites, architecturally speaking. Since the museum would be dedicated to a rather dry, humorless discipline, she felt very strongly that the building should be aesthetically pleasing to balance it out.

Maybe that was why she loved Grand Central, she mused as she entered the main concourse. She loved the color of the ceiling and its constellations, she loved the marble floor. She loved the fact that it was so utilitarian – it was a train station for christsake, you got on, you got off, you bought your copy of the _Post_ and went on your merry way – and yet so beautiful and vast, right in the middle of the city.

She made her way to the bar, in a good mood and anticipating a Sidecar. The scene that met her once inside, however, was not what she'd had in mind. Emma waved at her, perched on a chair upholstered in red velvet, wearing a very expensive-looking white dress. She looked amused and bored, as if she were watching a Shakespearian comedy and only half paying attention.

Shaw was currently pushed up against the bar by another man, who was gripping fistfuls of Shaw's sweater, seemingly only a hair away from mangling his neck rather than his cashmere. Charlotte strode fiercely towards the bar and pulled the man, as best she could, towards her and away from Shaw.

"_What_ on _earth_ is going on here?"

In the same beat, she realized how preposterously prim she sounded, and how very good looking this man was.

"Shaw, go get yourself a drink," Charlotte said, dealing with Thing 1. She pulled Thing 2, whose name she did not yet know, towards the window. She put her hands on each of his shoulders, as if she were going to shake some sense into him – lord knows she wanted to. His arms were tense and his eyes still flashed anger. She leaned in a little so she could get a good look into his greeny-grayish-blueish (getting a little distracted, there, wasn't she?) eyes.

"Calm down," she told the man. Somehow, she didn't sound pedantic, or snide, or flippant, or any other way that phrase could be taken. She just sounded sure. As if she had confidence in a man she had never even met.

"Get off me," he said, in a hardened way that should have bothered anyone else. But Charlotte could feel him relax beneath her palms. He plucked each of her hands off his shoulders and let them fall back at her sides, sizing her up.

"Who are you?"

"Charlotte Xavier."

"How did you-"

"I don't know. Listen, just calm down." It seemed to be working. The man looked almost human now, if a very good-looking specimen. She felt suddenly very confused, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she'd just walked into one of Manhattan's best bars to find a strange man ready to strangle Sebastian Shaw. That was nothing new. She was confused as to why she had so intuitively understood this man and what he needed, and why he had let her give it to him. "Just tell me why you're mad at Shaw."

"I – " he started, seeming just as confused. "He wants me to build your museum in Brooklyn. Right now, the spot he wants is occupied by a few hundred public housing units and a school, and he was just _smirking_ about it and, I just couldn't."

"It's okay, really. Listen, we haven't even started thinking about location yet. I thought I might let the architectural design dictate it. Shaw was probably just trying to wind you up. He's a douchebag. Really."

He nodded, heading towards the door and seeing himself out. Who was that? Charlotte wondered.

And as if reading her thoughts, Emma announced, "Erik Lehnsherr, everyone. One of our possible architects."


End file.
